Spatial abilities represent a fundamental yet poorly understood aspect of human and animal cognition. Through laboratory experiments on food-caching birds, this research will investigate questions of adaptive specialization of spatial learning/memory, cerebral lateralization of spatial function, and psychological mechanisms of spatial memory/orientation. Scattercaching birds have demonstrated spatial-memory abilities far in excess of those thus far shown by other animals. Adaptive specialization of spatial learning mechanisms will be tested for using an experimental design which for the first time allows close approximation of the spatial memory problem faced by food caching birds in the wild without sacrificing experimental control. The performance of the gray jay, a food-caching specialist, will be compared with that of the crow, a related species exhibiting minimal caching, and the domestic pigeon, a noncaching species. Experimental protocols include both caching/recovery and an analogous noncaching task. Brain asymmetry for spatial functions, though established in humans, has been little investigated in other animals. In birds, visual input from on eye is directly transmitted only to the opposite hemisphere. Failure of interocular transfer of training has been demonstrated for birds under a variety of conditions, making them excellent subjects for investigation of asymmetry of visual functions. Asymmetry of spatial memory will be tested for by forcing subjects to cache and recover food with one eye cupped. Highly accurate spatial-orientation abilities are well documented for both humans and animals, but the psychological mechanisms used in solving these problems remain obscure. Systematic manipulation of prominent landmarks (spatial cues) between caching and recovery sessions will enable quantification of the metric information necessary for cache relocation. This data will be used to formalize and intuitive optimality model of landmark/cache site selection, which should be applicable to spatial-orientation problems in general.